Tempe’s Childsplay gets most of the accolades when it comes to raising the artistic bar for theater for young audiences in the Valley. But TYA, as “theater for young audiences” inevitably is abbreviated, also is a specialty of Arizona State University’s School of Theatre of Film, which sends many of its master’s graduates on to Childsplay and offers one youth production in each of its MainStage seasons.

The latest is “¡Bocón!,” a magical-realist fable about war, social injustice and migration set in Central America during the era of death squads and los desaparacidos, or “the disappeared.” Heavy topics, to be sure, but the 1989 script by Lisa Loomer (“The Waiting Room,” “Living Out”) transforms them into the timeless language of myth, and the student actors and designers — with a couple of pro ringers — bring her narrative to life in a vivid multimedia performance.

The title character is 12-year-old Miguel, an irrepressible bocón, or “bigmouth,” growing up in a farming village and played to plucky perfection by Osiris Cuen (cross-dressing ala Mary Martin). Miguel’s mother keeps him indoors at night with tales of La Llorona, the ghostly “weeping woman” who drowned her own children and haunts the countryside in search of fresh victims. But the real danger comes from the soldiers in a civil war who aim to silence anyone who speaks out against them.

When his parents become the latest to be disappeared, Miguel’s voice vanishes along with them, and so he embarks on a quest to find it and to escape to the “border of lights” in the north. Aiding him is none other than La Llorona herself (the excellent Meg Sullivan), who is not quite the monster she first appears to be.

Performed in the round, with the stage at Galvin Playhouse transformed into an intimate black-box space, “¡Bocón!” stands among the best productions in recent memory at ASU.

Grad-student director Megan Weaver and her creative team make use of theatrical tricks both ancient and state-of-the-art, from the evocative masks (human and canine) designed by Valley artist Zarco Guerrero to abstract video projections by Dan Fine, the director’s fellow master-of-fine-arts candidate.

La Llorona first appears as a towering spectral figure operated by three puppeteers, and when Miguel, at the end of his long journey, confronts an imperious immigration judge in the United States, he is confined in a tight cube of light that bursts into an intricate green maze symbolic of faceless bureaucracy.

Although it’s couched in the language of parable, Loomer’s narrative comes with a strong political point of view. Miguel’s father, for example, tells him a distinctly left-wing version of the creation story in which God, angered by Adam’s theft of the apple, slices his creation into three parts: the head is the rich man, with an all-consuming mouth; the arms are the poor man, doomed to servitude; and the feet are the soldiers, who kick the poor into action. The subtext of the story will, no doubt, give parents and children plenty to discuss on the ride home.

In many ways, “¡Bocón!” serves as a companion piece to “The Sun Serpent,”Childsplay’s stellar world-premiere drama from last season about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. Using many of the same theatrical techniques, “The Sun Serpent” told the story of ancient conflicts that resonate through the centuries in a direct line to those that Loomer so fearlessly tackles.

It’s a shame, then, that ASU’s provocative approach to TYA seems to be a bit of a secret. At the performance I attended, I spotted only two bona-fide minors. Although this exquisitely rendered production has much to offer to adult theatergoers, it deserves to be seen by an audience as broad as its ambitions.

Reach the reviewer at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896.

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